See Beyond

Happy Birthday EyeQue!

It’s been 3 years since EyeQue was founded on March 6, 2015, and what a three years it has been. From securing funding and setting up the business to sitting in an empty office space full of dirty desks which were no doubt the remnants of some previous startup, came a dream to help millions. In September of 2015 we boldly declared that we would disrupt the Eye Care industry! EyeQue would create a win – win for both consumers and Eye Care providers by creating, and selling, incredibly low cost and accurate devices based on smartphone technology.

How to start such an endeavor?

Step one was to make sure we could actually sell and market these devices; if we succeeded in building them. To that end we licensed a promising technology from MIT, the basis of our smartphone refraction test. The next step was to hire a few people who knew something about the technology. To this day we still firmly believe that the most important ingredient in a startup, besides funding, is having the right people that can make things happen. Our vision to build a low cost optical device that works on a wide selection of iOS and Android phones was a significant technical challenge.

Our first product, the Personal Vision Tracker

It started with rubber bands, paper clips and a few cheap lenses. These humble elements became the first miniscope, showing lines and preliminary refraction measurements on an iPhone app that we somehow cobbled together. With encouraging results, by Christmas of 2015, we knew we could build a commercial product based on the first primitive prototypes. From there we played around with endless possibilities in design and finally settled on a minimum viable product, which was released a year later at $29.99.We earned our first 4000 customers from Kickstarter and won the CES 2017 Best of Innovation award.

Today we are a company of 15 persons and are about to release an exciting new product called Insight. Our growth enabled us to pursue more ideas and turn them into reality. We are more passionate than ever about our mission: to provide accurate, affordable, and convenient vision testing products to consumers all around the globe. While there are still plenty of business puzzles to solve, such as how to scale up the business, it’s a lot of fun putting those pieces together — each day brings new unexpected challenges.

There are two groups we’d like to give huge thanks to.

First it is our founder, Tibor Laczay, who had the strategic vision, powerful ideas, and made the investment to make EyeQue come to life.

Second, we’d like to thank the many early adopters who gave us a chance. Some of the feedback from our early adopters was blatantly painful, however the words of encouragement were resounding. We’ve shipped 15,000 devices in our first year and we’re constantly updating our apps to improve the user experience and make them more user friendly .

Thanks for celebrating our birthday with us. We are excited for another brilliant year filled with new products that will help our customers take control of their vision.